National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) is going abandon the 25-year-old 710 MW Koel-Karo project for lack of interest of the Jharkhand government. Nearly 200 employees posted at the project site at Torpa in Ranchi are being shifted gradually to other project areas of NHPC.
The project which was conceived 25 years ago could not even draw the ground-work. As the locals had been resisting the project since its inception.
Jharkhand government like its counterpart in Bihar did not come forward to cooperate with the project officials in undertaking fresh surveys of persons to be affected in the proposed project.
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The project issue had also gone to the apex court which issued certain guidelines in the interest of the affected people most of whom are scheduled castes and scheduled tribes.
After constitution of Jharkhand, the NHPC management had got the impression that the newly installed government led by Babulal Marandi would take a positive role in helping the NHPC to undertake the construction of the power project.
The state had already completed a year since its formation and during this period the government did not take any concrete step to go ahead with the project. Meetings with the state governor Prabhat Kumar and the chief minister Babulal Marandi by the NHPC chairman Yogendra Prasad for a number of times made no difference in resolving the bottlenecks in the process of the project.
According to official sources, the project if had taken its shape would affect 131 villages hitting 6,000 families and about 38,000 people. The project had required over 22,000 hectares of land.
Local industry sources said that the Jharkhand government was not keen to accept the Koel-Karo project as the state's present power scenario was better and the Jharkhand State Electricity Board (JSEB) would become surplus in power by the first quarter of 2002 and would start selling power to Power Trading Corporation and Damodar Valley Corporation.
Besides, the sources added that Babulal Marandi had formed his ministry with a number of parties of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and there had been a difference of opinion among the partners of the ministry over setting up the Koel-Karo hydel power project acquiring a vast areas of tribal land and uprooting them from their homesteads.
The sources said that NHPC had incurred several hundred crores during last 25 years in the process of setting up the proposed project and now all the endeavours including capital of the corporation would go waste if Babulal Marandi government remained silent over the project for its execution, persuading the NHPC management to reconsider its decision.